Wanderer

A few days after the début of “Moneyball,” the film’s director, Bennett Miller, was scouting the shelves at the Village Chess Shop, on Thompson Street, meditatively hefting rosewood bishops. As a student in New York University’s film program, a quarter century ago, he used to haunt the store. “Chess became like an illness,” he said. “I wasn’t even Salieri level, but I was good enough to obsess on it.” He soon dropped out to play the game in Washington Square Park full time. This was followed by his first real job, as an assistant at the director Jonathan Demme’s company; early on, he’d rebuffed Demme’s compliments about some still photos he’d taken (Miller felt they were underexposed), and a few months later, he says, he was let go for just not being a very good assistant. That was also his last real job. Since then, Miller, who remains lithe and pensive at forty-four, has spent his time filming commercials, directing the highly regarded “Capote” (2005), and wandering the earth.

After loping through N.Y.U., he ducked into Ballato, an Italian joint he likes whose walls are studded with photos of celebrated visitors. The proprietor, a burly man named Emilio Vitolo, called out, “Bennett, I was watching Regis this morning? He went to see your movie? He raved about it on TV!”

“That’s beautiful,” Miller said, breaking into a smile. He murmured, “I’m shocked that Emilio watches TV. I brought Tom Hanks here once—there’s a picture of him over there—and the next time I came back Emilio says”—Miller dipped into an Italian accent—“ ‘Bennett, your friend you brought? The guys in the kitchen say he played an astronaut in a movie.’ “

Miller’s conversation is full of thrumming silences, as he wheels like a locomotive in a roundhouse. “The original proprietor, John Ballato, was one of the witnesses in ‘Reds,’ “ he said at last, heading down a new track. He beckoned the owner over to his table: “Emilio, who was John Ballato?”

“He was this old man right here”—Vitolo pointed to a smiling gent in a photo from 1978. “That’s John Lennon behind him—he used to come in all the time.”

“But why was John Ballato in the movie ‘Reds’?” Miller asked.

Vitolo shrugged and said, “He was in the movie ‘Reds’ because he was a little comunista. He used to wear the big boots. Boots!”

Miller nodded sagely.

“How do you know he was in the movie ‘Reds’?” Vitolo asked.

“Because I’ve seen it thirty-seven times,” Miller said. “Can I get the Chicken Emilio?”

“Of course,” Vitolo said, approvingly. “So what is it about, the movie ‘Reds’?”

“It’s a love story.”

“Ah!” With a gesture of admiration, the proprietor backed into the kitchen.

After a moment, Miller remarked, “I have a fantasy of getting whacked in this restaurant. I’m surrounded by four or five friends, drinking a glass of wine, and I hear a ruckus, and there’d be just enough time to register a person’s face—it’s not clear, maybe someone like Emilio, but dispassionate—before the first of five bullets bursts into me.” He cleared a spot for his Chicken Emilio. “Three to the heart, two to the head.”

Miller’s films are marked by disaffection; they avoid homilies or uplift in favor of a kind of sparkling glumness. After Aaron Sorkin, one of “Moneyball” ’s two credited screenwriters, saw a preview of the work, he sent the director an e-mail: “I mean this in the best possible way—it’s a fifty-million-dollar indie film.” Miller explained, “Aaron does have more of a populist sense. What he writes is meant to go one hundred miles per hour and be fast and fun and bright and loud—and this film definitely benefits from his genius writing, but it also operates at a slower, more observational frequency.” He added, “To me, downers are uppers. They’re exhilarating because they orient you.” Miller saw “Moneyball” as a search-for-wisdom story. “It begins with Billy”—the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt—“realizing that he’s not where he’s supposed to be, that he’s displaced somehow.”

Does that ring any bells?

“Yeah, always. I could see walking away from all this at some point. If I had a dozen lives, one of them would involve really getting off the rails in India, heavy into meditation. Probably I’d have another life as a musician—these past couple of years I’ve taken up piano. And I could be a soldier.” He paraphrased a line from Milan Kundera about there being “some comfort in the notion of being stuck in a totalitarian organization. I even fantasize about being locked up in solitary confinement.” Miller sipped a cup of tea, mentally framing that scenario. “It’s possible,” he acknowledged, “that about three hours into my twenty-year sentence I’d begin to feel some regret for whatever crime I’d committed.” ♦